Chapter 39.2- One Thousand Hands

The human -ish face became less so as the mouth opened up to reveal a nuzzle.

“Get down” she was sure she yelled at her teammates but she couldn’t hear herself so it was more of a hope than anything else. She ducked and rolled, moving out of the way of fire. Choni slammed her foot into the ground and lifted a wall of earth that took the brunt of the flamethrower with no problems. She noted that Inoken had taken cover behind Choni’s earth wall as well. She pulled on their telepathic bond and gave them the details of her plan. This man was good, a skilled Jounin by all means, but he wasn’t listed as one of Suna’s S-rank threats. That meant that he was beatable.

The three of them could do it. They just had to do as Benzaiten-sensei taught them and think outside the box. They also had to surprise them. Their clans were famous. They weren’t the first Yamanaka-Nara-Akimichi team in the world. It was formulaic, but only because it worked. Choni crashed into her own wall, tearing it to pieces like an Akimichi on a mission, and the man barely had the time to dodge out of the way of the wrecking ball that she could become at will. She spun, tearing through two tents with no resistance before grinding to a halt with phenomenal control and then coming right back around aimed at the man’s puppet. Said puppet crouched down and then lashed out with its gleaming steel tail, holding it in front of it and waiting for Choni’s approach.

As if, she heard Inoken scoff in her mind once it became clear that the man intended for the puppet to stop Choni’s charge. She was inclined to agree and had almost voiced it when Choni hit the tail and came to a halt. She ground against the blockage, of course, trying to continue her rampage but the puppet had her dead stopped. Shika felt her shadow grab ahold of something for a second as she used Choni’s much larger shadow to lengthen hers and get into the man’s guard, only for the thing she’d caught to turn out to be another puppet. She could tell because it had no yin chakra for her shadow to interface with. The man’s head, facing away from them, turned a full 180 degrees to look at them and then its mouth opened.

She had to bend backwards at her waist to avoid the barrage of senbon that came from the nozzle that had shut out of the mouth. The barage ended when the puppet was forced to deal with Inoken’s attack. She watched as the hand that it lifted to block the blade ended up clashing with nothing but air. Genjutsu. With so many in their class using genjutsu as their preferred means of fighting, some would forget that Inoken was one of the most skilled Yamanaka when it came to the art.

The puppet was in no position to block her teammate’s blade from stabbing into its heart, but that did nothing to stop it, and that fact shocked Inoken for long enough that it was able to land a solid backhand against his head, sending him flying. She turned to where Choni struggled against the Hiruko puppet and found that her other teammate had already flagged and had fallen to the floor unconscious.

This situation was fucked, she lamented to herself while flaring her chakra as hard as she could. Fucking come here, you smug bastard, she called out to Shori in her mind.